Far From You

15

NOW (JUNE)

When I hear the front door open, I think it’s Mom checking on me. She came home yesterday during lunch, and we sat across from each other at the kitchen table, silent as I picked at my food and she drank a cup of coffee, shuffling through legal briefs.

I stop at the top of the stairs. I catch sight of him before he sees me, and I have a second, just a second, when I can hope.

But then his eyes fix on me and the awkwardness sparks in the air, as it has every time since he found my stash and the triplicates I’d stolen from him.

Dad isn’t disappointed in me like Mom is. He doesn’t have that mix of anger and fear that’s fueling her. Instead, he doesn’t know what to do or how to feel with me, and sometimes I think it’s worse, that he can’t decide between forgiving and blaming me.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Hello, Sophie.”

I stay at the top of the stairs, hoping the distance will protect me. “Did you have a good trip?”

“I did. How have things been? Have you settled in?”

I want to tell him everything. How Trev looks at me like he’s a masochist and I’m the embodiment of pain. How Mom and I are stuck in this sick game of who’ll break first. How I should go out to Mina’s grave but I can’t, because I’m afraid if I do, it’ll make it so real that I’ll slip. I’ll fall down and never get up.

Once upon a time, I’d been a daddy’s girl. I loved him wholly, preferred him to the point of cruelty. But that girl is gone. I rotted away what was left of her with pills and loss.

I’m not the daughter he raised. I’m not the daughter my mother wanted.

I’ve become something different, every parent’s nightmare: the drugs hidden in the bedroom, the lies, the call in the middle of the night, the police knocking on the door.

Those are the things he remembers now. Not the time he took me to The Nutcracker, just him and me, and I’d been so scared of the Mouse King that I’d crawled into his lap and he’d promised to keep me safe. Or how he had tried to help Trev build me raised flower beds in the backyard, even though he kept slamming his fingers with the hammer. A dentist has no business hammering things, but he’d done it anyway.

“Sophie?” Dad asks, his voice breaking me from my thoughts.

“I’m sorry,” I say automatically. “It’s been fine. Things have been fine.”

He stares at me longer than he should, and there are worry lines on his forehead I haven’t noticed before. My eyes flick to the gray at his temples. Is there more since I last saw him? I know what he’s thinking: Is she zoning out, or is she on something?

I can’t bear it.

Nine months. Three weeks. Three days.

“I was going out to my garden.” I gesture toward the backyard, feeling stupid.

“I’ve got some work to do.” He hesitates. “I could do it out on the deck? If you’d like the company?”

I almost say no, but then I think about those worry lines and the gray in his hair, what I’ve done to him. I shrug. “Sure.”

We don’t speak for the hour we stay out in my garden. He just sits at the teak table on the deck and goes through his files while I dig and root rocks out of the soil.

It feels like what I used to think safe was.

I know better now.